Nicholas Barry

I've been slowly trying to get interns to work together more. I've been doing it both with my Davis Dollars interns and with my interns in Senator Steinberg's office, with different strategies.

I think it's important for a lot of reasons.

It develops the interns' skills, initiative, and responsibility to be accountable to each other.

Two heads are better than one - they can think of more ideas together than they'd be able to think of working alone on their projects.

This allows me to tap into the creativity and intelligence of every intern. I can't think of everything. That fact is obvious, but assigning tasks unilaterally only makes sense if I believe I can think of everything we should do, and how we should do it. By allowing interns to talk about what to work on and how to accomplish it, they can come up with ideas I would not have thought of.

It removes me as a bottleneck - when I need to assign tasks for everyone, it means interns are stalled if they need to wait to hear back from me. By delegating some authority to the intern teams, they can bypass me. This requires some watching, however, to make sure I approve of what they're working on.

There are different ways I'm having interns work together. My Davis Dollars interns work in small teams (2-3 people per team) to focus on different things. Two interns work on business outreach. Another is working on community outreach, which is broad enough that she helps other interns out as well as doing her own projects. Another intern works on our Gardenscaping project to create gardens for people in Davis, and she has some auxiliary interns helping her out, which I've helped recruit. Yet another intern helps other groups by working on design issues (creating publications, logos, etc.). Grouping them up this way has been tremendously successful in that it capitalizes on their good ideas and reduces pressure on me to think of everything.

In Senator Steinberg's office, I've been a bit less successful in thinking of ways to get interns to work together. They work together on their ownership initiatives, but I’ve had more trouble finding ways for them to work together on their core tasks of writing response letters and working on casework. Many of these core tasks are (to my mind) highly individual tasks that are difficult to split up.

I’ve been thinking of broader ways to get interns to work together, though. Working together doesn’t necessarily require splitting a task down the middle. Rather than assigning individual tasks to interns, I could allow them to create a division of labor by assigning a block of tasks to a group of interns, and allowing the interns to split the tasks between them. This would give them more initiative and make them partners in figuring out the best way to get through all the tasks. My current method commoditizes both the tasks and the interns by making piecemeal work out of something that could benefit from more creative thinking.

I did notice yesterday that two interns who were just starting out spontaneously started helping each other with tasks. Lucy, one of the interns, has already shown more initiative than average, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when she started helping Rochelle (who is a bit newer than Lucy). But I could also encourage teamwork by assigning each new intern to a more senior intern, and ask that senior intern to be responsible for guiding and mentoring the younger intern.

What are your thoughts? Do you have suggestions? How do you work with interns?